It wasn’t too many years ago that this would have been a silly question — if you drew a Venn diagram of marketing and technology, it would look like two circles that don’t ever touch. How times have changed! Back in 2012, Garner Group predicted that CMOs would outspend CIOs by 2017, but many were skeptical. The numbers for 2017 aren’t yet in, but last year, Gartner doubled down with data saying, “Yes, it is really going to happen in 2017.”

Regardless of the outcome of the great CMO vs. CIO spending spree, marketers are clearly significant tech spenders and they must have a strategy managing this new technology portfolio. In my work with clients, there are typically a few ways that this works:

Marketing and IT work together. Marketing has the budget but IT manages the work. This is the most common situation, but marketers in this situation tell me that they are often concerned that the IT group is not as familiar with marketing platforms as they are with other technologies that they have been managing for years, so maybe they haven’t chosen the right components.

Marketing does it alone. Marketing has the budget and spends it directly with vendors — often for cloud services that don’t require traditional IT. This is a less-common situation, but marketers in this situation tend to have a hodgepodge of components that don’t really work together well, or they have chosen one vendor (usually it is Adobe) that integrates everything, but for a very high price.

Mix and match. IT handles some components and marketing goes direct to vendors for others. Often this cuts along on-premises vs. cloud lines, and invariably leads to the hodgepodge situation described above.

You might have noticed that no matter what you do, you probably have one or more of these problems:

Poorly-chosen components

High costs

Poorly-integrated components

That’s because how you go about it doesn’t insulate you from problems. No matter how IT and marketing work (or don’t work) together, integrating a marketing technology stack is either expensive or problematic, or both. I am often brought in because the marketers don’t understand technology and the technologists don’t understand marketing. Because I understand both, I can translate and advise. And this is what I usually tell people:

You can’t fix everything at once. It’s better to focus on one thing at a time — maybe it is the easiest problem to fix or maybe it is the most important problem to fix, but working on improving just one thing lets you tackle problems at a size that they can be solved.

Analytics are not optional. No matter what part of the stack you attack, analytics are critical to sound operation and to integration with other components. In fact, inability to do end-to-end analytics is probably the problem I solve the most.

Fewer components might be better than lousy components. Each component costs money — usually money to a vendor, but even free or open source components need money for personnel to use and operate it. Sometimes it is better to do good job with a few critical components rather than spreading a too-small budget over everything. If you can live without a particular component for a while, then spend the money on others that matter more.

It’s hard for some marketers to cope with their new roles as tech experts. Let me know in the comments what your advice is. We’re all in this together.

I live in the New York City area, and among baseball fans of a certain age, there is a touchstone event that they remember: New York Yankees baseball player Thurman Munson dying in a plane crash during the baseball season in 1979. My friend Charles related to me that he was recently among a group of Yankee fans who, each in turn, were asked that question: “Where were you when Thurman Munson died?”

Each gave their answer, until it was Charles’ turn. He said that he vividly remembered where he was: “I was right here. Who the hell is Thurman Munson?”

That’s the problem with touchstones. They are quite powerful among those who share them. But they are puzzling to anyone outside that circle. It is striking how easy it is to assume that your touchstone also resonates with others, and it is those assumptions that are killers in marketing.

Some of you know that last year, my wife and I sold our house and moved to an apartment in a large city. We also sold our cars. Since then, we notice a constant barrage of new car commercials that do not at all resonate with us anymore. We are especially amused at the raft of ads showing new cars with big red bows on them, because giving your spouse a new car seems to be a touchstone for a significant part of the population.

In the past, we’ve had to resign ourselves to guessing what ideas might pique our customers’ interests. We had to take a shot at what might work. But we now have many ways to learn more about what customers want:

Digital ad data around which topics your clients engage with

Social data that shows their sentiment around certain topics

Web analytics data around what content they view on your site

A/B testing data that shows which messages they prefer

And there is plenty where that came from — more data online and offline. The question is whether you are using it. What data are you collecting? What messages are you testing? How do you know what is working? Are you still guessing the way everyone once did, or have you stepped up to become data-driven?

You can keep guessing your touchstones. Or you can use your data to look like a customer genius. It’s up to you.

It’s been over a year since Donald Trump was elected US President. While the jury is figuratively out on the involvement of Russia in the outcome of the election, both Democrats and Republicans have lamented the “fake news” on both sides of the aisle. Some have criticized mainstream media outlets for fake news while others have criticized Facebook and Google for its spread. A year seems like enough time to step back and ask what the implications are: as marketers, what should we be concerned about?

Clearly, most marketers aren’t involved in partisan politics, but the new distrust among citizens of all stripes of what is served up by mainstream and new media hurts big brands. Large companies are not exactly the most trusted sources of information, and if their media surrogates can’t be trusted either, what is a brand to do?

The rise of radio led to the likes of Father Coughlin, the fiery Catholic priest and anti-Semite. But the US had it easy, as many believe that radio was a key way that dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini rose to power—and consolidated it.

Television brought us Joe McCarthy, but it also brought us Edward R. Murrow. And this is what even old folks like me remember. Three TV networks in the US. Because there were so few networks, there was more than enough money to go around and to fund good journalism. It wasn’t the free-for-all of a dozen newspapers in a big city or just as many radio stations—all fighting each other. Three TV networks had a very lucrative business and could afford good journalism.

But what we all think of as the norm—high-minded journalism—is actually the aberration. Once cable came in, we started to see criticism of cable news networks as being biased. Social media and other fractured digital channels have led to even more partisanship and criticism. And we hope that AI and other technology will save us—and maybe it will.

But color me skeptical. To me, the commercial imperative has led to this kind of fake news. We all lamented that TV viewers preferred wrestling to opera, but the truth is that commercial media leads to giving the public what it wants. And the more competitors—newspapers, radio stations, TV networks, websites—the more extreme the content needs to be to get attention.

Will AI make a difference? It might. Maybe AI can cut through the veracity problem. Years ago, Cornell researchers proved that fake product reviews could be detected. So could Facebook and Google succeed at identifying trust factors? Sure. But what might be needed is not better technology, but a change in attitude by we, the people. We need to actually appreciate facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” If we could figure out how to get people to care about verifiable facts, then maybe this can change. But we have a history of buying fake news that goes back over a hundred years, so I am dubious that this is a technical problem.

And what does it mean for marketers? It might be more important for your customers to talk about you than ever, because people won’t believe you. It might be more important for you to use verifiable facts than ever, because people expect you to exaggerate or even outright lie.

Most people aren’t, but that’s okay. It doesn’t take much to get ready—mostly an open mind and willingness to learn. What you need to understand first is that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t some shiny object that solves all problems. Instead it is a new way of solving some problems in ways that only people could in the past. That might sound like the computer will eat your job, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Listen to my podcast at MountainTop Data to see how you can be ready for artificial intelligence in marketing.

I have been talking to more and more clients lately who are up in arms about these entitled millennials that are so hard to work with. Yeah, the complainers are baby boomers like me, or maybe Gen Xers. (How did you know?) I try to help them think through what their options are (like any good consultant) but at a certain point, I have to talk to them a bit more forcefully. At a certain point, they need to confront their expectations, because their frustration is about how millennials aren’t meeting their own expectations.

Sometimes, I can do this gently, but I have more than once had to sit back in my chair and ask my client, “So if these millennials are so awful to work with, who do you plan to work with instead?”

That usually helps us focus the conversation on what we can do to change the conversation rather than what we want other people to do. We have control only over what we personally do. It’s ultimately very passive to complain about other people or the situation and to merely sit around waiting for circumstances to change so that we can then do our work.

One of the big expectations is that the experienced people should mentor the younger folks. I find this to be very limiting. I try to engage in mutual mentoring, where I can impart what I know but I also ask questions about what the other person knows, because—guess what—I don’t have a corner on knowledge.

I fancy myself a pretty good marketer and I know that I have a lot to teach. But I couldn’t survive without working with millennial marketers who are teaching me. I need to understand new technologies and how people are using them. And I can only get so far by using them myself. The truth is that younger people are blazing many of these trails and I need to be learning from them.

And that leads me to my best piece of advice for dealing with millennials. Stop treating them as a group. You wouldn’t see executives sitting around complaining about how hard it is to work with women or black people or short people or “night” people because even though people in those groups might have some things in common, they really just want to be treated as individuals. All of this discussion about “millennials” overlooks the fact that they are as different from each other as members of any other group.

My best tip for dealing with people of any age is to listen. Find out what they know. Find out what they want to know. Find out what they can do. Find out what they need help doing. Understand their dreams. See how you can help.

If you do that, you will be great at working with millennials and anyone else of any age.

I am often working with companies and individuals on improving their digital marketing skills and I like to remind them that merely upgrading their skills is not sufficient. Your company won’t pay you any more because you are smarter. Instead, they will pay you more only because you are making them more money. No one pays for knowing something. They pay for doing something. That’s what makes it harder, because nobody’s making any more time. You need to stop doing some of the things you already do.

I remember almost 20 years ago when I was made the manager of IBM’s Digital Analytics team. Okay, okay, that’s is what they would be called now. Back then, they called it web metrics. I was excited about this new responsibility and when I brought my team together, I started asking them questions:

How do we know which campaigns are doing better than others?

When we change the web pages, which kinds of changes seem to improve our results?

Are some types of changes working better in some business units than in others?

You get the picture. I had a lot of questions and I wanted to start using the analytics (okay, metrics), to help us make better decisions, improve our marketing results, and drive revenue up even faster.

Unfortunately, they just looked up at me blankly and eventually said, “We have no idea.”

Well, that was disappointing on the first day working with my new team, but that’s okay. I recovered nicely and then asked them how we could get started answering one of those questions.

More blank stares. The lead person shuffled uncomfortably in his seat and finally said, “I don’t see how we can answer any of these questions. Each one would take days to research, and we don’t have the staff or the time to do it. Everyone here is working flat-out.”

Again, not the answer I wanted to hear, but okay. So I asked the pregnant question, “Well, so what are you spending all of your time doing?”

At this point, they rolled their eyes at the stupidity of their new boss, who was too clueless to understand that they spent nearly 100% of their time generating the metrics reports that were shipped to all the executives. Now, today, you don’t need any specialized people to pull reports, but back then everyone assumed that was how it was done.

So I naively said, “Okay, so let’s stop doing the reports so we can answer these questions.” The reaction from the team seemed as if I had said, “Let’s drop babies from skyscrapers.”

“We can’t do that!” they screamed as one. “The executives get these reports. If we don’t do them, we’ll get fired!”

They dragged me through an inventory of reports on traffic and page views and monthly comparisons and top pages and subdomains and countries and, wow, there were a lot of reports. It was entirely clear that they really needed to spend all of their time creating them. And they were all sent in the first couple of weeks of the new month to show last month’s numbers. No one was allowed to take their vacation on those days.

On the day I was speaking with them, it just so happened that they had just sent last month’s pile 0′ reports out and they were now busily updating all the reports to reflect the changes from reorganizations and product launches and new pages and—there was a lot to do, all of the time.

So I faced a dilemma. Would we keep doing the reports or would we actually answer some of these questions and make better decisions, which is what I assumed the metrics were for. I didn’t think very long before I answered, “That’s okay, I will take the blame. They will fire me.”

There was still an aftershock of grumbling and complaining because they were sure that I had no idea what I was doing. It’s understandable: because if I was right, I was basically telling them that what they had been spending their lives doing was worthless. I hadn’t really thought about that at the time, and I probably could have been more tactful, but I wasn’t going to change my mind about this. I strongly believed that analytics have no power unless they are used for decisions, and I couldn’t imagine how these reports led to better decisions—or at least far less often than answering questions would.

But I stood fast. No updates to the reports. I don’t care what the reorganizations were. There would be no time spent “pulling” reports in the first couple of weeks every month. My team was utterly unconvinced but they listened to me, God bless ‘em.

I sent them on a hunt through the data to answer a few questions. Many of them were wild goose chases but just as many had real value and produced true insights that we started to publicize inside the company to alert marketers of some better practices that might lead to better results.

Before we knew it, the calendar had flipped to the next month and the days passed. Each day another missed deadline where no report was going out. There were over 200 people on the distribution lists for the reports. And you’d expect that at least some of them would complain, “Where is my report?” And they did—four of them.

So I directed my team to get those four people logins to the web metrics system and to offer to train their staff to pull any report they wanted at any time—they would no longer have to wait until the end of the month. I promised that they could call on us to help them answer their questions at any point. All four were at least mollified—one of them thought it was great—so I didn’t get fired.

I kept pointing my team at the higher value job of finding insights, answering questions, and increasing our business value. It might be hard for you to appreciate this story today because it seems plain as the nose on your face that this is what digital analytics teams do. But that’s only in retrospect. At the time, this seemed very controversial, just as today there are controversies inside your job about how to spend your time. I implore you to focus on business value rather than what is expected of you. The old stuff is always expected but it is not always valuable. You probably won’t have to make as dramatic a turn as I did—and I probably didn’t need to do it as starkly as I did—but you have to decide every day how to use your time and maybe that of your team’s.

Don’t blow your chance to do what is valuable by merely doing what is expected.

Many of you no longer face this problem within your company, which is great. Some of you are increasing spending on digital and reaping the rewards, but not all. Some B2C companies spend the lion’s share of their marketing budget on traditional marketing, even though the digital is highly effective, and so should get a bigger slice of the pie. Worse, I still work with B2B clients who not only do not understand the value of digital marketing, but they don’t even understand the value of any marketing at all. Marketing is considered a cost center and gets as little investment as they think they can get away with. What can help these executives see the light?

You might at first think that it should be easy. After all, if the numbers show that digital marketing is working, why not spend more on it? There are a few reasons:

Inertia. It is harder to get execs to do something new than to keep up the old. If the company is plugging along, why change? Change is risky and invites criticism, so why chance it?

Lack of analytics. B2C companies sometimes can show the value of digital marketing tactics in ways that they can’t duplicate for B2B. Because they can’t compare, they are reluctant to shift spending. Similarly, some B2B companies have so little spending going on that their analytics aren’t even trustworthy. They don’t spend, so they don’t measure, so they can’t prove they should spend.

History. What worked for these execs when they cut their teeth in the business is good enough for them today. B2B execs learned that marketing was a low-level low-value area, so they haven’t kept up with how digital has completely changed the game. B2C execs have an unshakable belief in traditional marketing and are reluctant to reduce its investment for this new unproven alternative.

So, if analytics won’t persuade them, what do you do? Show them the competition. One thing you should know about executives is that they are fiercely competitive. That’s how they rose to the top of heap in their own company. They certainly don’t want to be in second-place as a company. But how do you show them what competitors are doing?

Show them the pundits. Dig up the consulting studies on how customer behavior is changing to require reaching them in digital channels.

Show them how companies in their industry are adapting. Show them how the world has changed from what they knew. Show them how investment in marketing (especially digital marketing) is correlated to improved revenue and profit growth.

Show them the numbers. Yeah, I know I just said that it can be hard to get numbers, but there are numbers out there. If your competitors are public companies, you can pull their annual reports and SEC filings and get numbers on how much they spend on marketing. You might be surprised to see that in the same industry, some companies spend 10 times what others do.

Don’t sit idly by while your competitors are running digital rings around you. Eventually that doesn’t work out for you personally, because some new exec will show up that thinks you were asleep at the switch. Make it your business to persuade your execs of what is really needed. If you can’t maybe you need to find someone new to work for, because your job at that company is a lot less stable than you think.

Maybe that sounds like a silly question to some of you, but it is one that I have been asking my clients lately. It’s taken a decade, but many of my clients actually know which content works better than others do. They have labored over web analytics and conversions and attribution and bounce rates and they are finally starting to think they know which content seems to be working better than others—and kudos to them.

But it does beg the next question: “Why is that content working?” Because if you don’t know why, how do you do it again?

I often see people looking at the successful content but they know there is more to the story. For example, I asked a client, “How do you know which content is successful?” They told me that it has the highest conversion rate. So I said that I knew the best content on their site: the thank you page. 100% conversion rate. And I know the second best content: the shopping cart page.

Now, clearly, that’s silly and we would never say that those pages are the best content on our site. But we say things that are equally silly because we say that the best content on our site are the product pages that have the highest conversion rates. But is that really the best content or the best products?

A few clients are ready for something deeper. They are really asking the “why” questions. There are ways of using text analytics and machine learning to identify why certain content works. I won’t say that I have it completely nailed yet, but we are finding some very interesting things with our first couple of clients. I would love to tell you what they are, except they wouldn’t be interesting to you.

One thing that I am learning is that there is nothing more interesting to a digital marketer as an insight as to why something is working on their website. But I am also learning that there is nothing less interesting to a digital marketers than why something is working on someone else’s website.

]]>https://biznology.com/2017/07/know-content-works/feed/0How do you migrate to a new site search engine?https://biznology.com/2017/06/migrate-new-search-engine/
https://biznology.com/2017/06/migrate-new-search-engine/#respondThu, 01 Jun 2017 13:00:18 +0000https://biznology.com/?p=32515

Recently, I shared how I have become very popular recently because Google has withdrawn Google Site Search. Many large companies who were

Recently, I shared how I have become very popular recently because Google has withdrawn Google Site Search. Many large companies who were using it as their website search engine recoiled in horror at the prospect of having ads on their site search results page—ads from their competitors. Try explaining that to the boss.

So if you are one of the many that is wondering just how to replace your site search engine, these are the basic steps:

Do your business case. Maybe “there will be ads” is enough, but I often help clients show the revenue improvements and cost savings that stem from making the search results better. (Yes, you can project them and yes you can measure that they happened after the fact.)

Gather your requirements. How many pages do you have? How many searches? How many countries and languages? Do you crawl the pages or push from the CMS? Do you curate some results manually to make sure they are good? Cloud or on-premises? Speed? Price?

Round up the suspects. Everyone should look at Solr and Elasticsearch—they are free open source and do a very good job in many situations, but there are plenty of proprietary engines out there than can make a ton of sense.

Run some trials. See if you can take a test drive. Ask some others for their experience. See how it seems to work.

Install, test, and cut over. Standard IT stuff, right? Wrong.

You probably wouldn’t randomly change pages on your site, hoping that conversion is improving. You test them. You use A/B or multivariate testing. Don’t you need to do the same thing for your search engine?

You set up the new search engine (you can even set up several if you are ambitious) and you get the pages indexed and start tweaking the settings. (Consultants like me can help with this if you don’t know how.)

And then you siphon a small percentage of the production searches to the new search engine(s). You can run them from test servers. Just make sure the load is low enough that they perform well and that if they keel over that you fall back over to the regular production search engine.

Why do this? Because what you really want to test is whether your searchers are finding what they are looking for. You can use a site search analytics tool, such as SoloSegment Site Search Inspector [Full disclosure: I am their Senior Strategist] to check whether searches are successful or not.

What makes a search successful? That search gets search results (it isn’t a “not found”), at least one of those results gets clicked, and the searcher doesn’t “pogostick” back to the search results screen within a few seconds. If they get no results or they don’t click on anything or they pogostick back, you know that was bad. You don’t know that the successes are good, but it’s the way to bad. Eliminating the bad leaves mostly good.

So, clients use Site Search Inspector to constantly monitor their searches and improve the number of successes, where searchers presumably found what they were looking for. But when you are migrating to a new search engine, that’s when you really need it.

Let’s say that you are using Google Site Search now. And maybe it isn’t the greatest search engine ever, but it is working good enough that you don’t get a lot of complaints. What happens when you put in the new one? Most search engines have the potential to deliver better results than Google Site search, but they also need a lot more care and feeding. They need their algorithms tweaked, their defaults messed with—they don’t always work so well out of the box. If you just install it, test that it operates, and cut over, you might be tragically harming your business results and have no way to quickly fix it. Conversion rates drop. Call center costs go up. All because the new search engine isn’t as good out of the box as Google Site Search.

So you can use SoloSegment Site Search Inspector to test the new search engine. Install SoloSegment Keyword Inspector to get a baseline of analytics for your current Google Site Search experience. Set up the new search engine to get (say) 1% of the production searches, but continue to route most of the searches through your existing Google Site Search engine.

Make a change to your search application so that every Google Site Search request has a new URL parameter (&engine=google), but route a small, random sample of searches through your new search engine (&engine=elastic). You can even test several at once. Site Search Inspector can show you the numbers for each search engine, so you can see how they compare. Take a look at the no results searches, at the clickthrough rate, and the pogostick rate. How do the two engines compare for the same exact search keywords?

Now, you suddenly have the information you need to know exactly when your new search engine is good enough to replace (or even surpass) your old search engine. No guesswork involved. Tune your new search engine until it surpasses the old search engine, and then install it on big production servers and route all searches to the new search engine.

You don’t have to do this. You can just cut over and cross your fingers that no one will notice. But if you do, you might have weeks or months of work to fix the new engine and you are losing money every day and getting screamed at every day. Instead, why not use the old A/B test and be confident that you have it working from day one?